by Clare Morgana Gillis, Special for USA TODAY

by Clare Morgana Gillis, Special for USA TODAY

ALEPPO, Syria -- "I'm only 28, but look at me! I look 54 with this war!"

Haraki, a mother of 6, stood on a trash- and rubble-filled sidewalk with three of her friends in Aleppo's largely rebel-controlled Shaar district. "We have no food, no medicines, and no money to go to Turkey."

Haraki's story is common to nearly all the civilians who remain in Aleppo, where anti-government fighters have been fighting off the military forces of dictator Bashar Assad for three months.

USA TODAY freelance correspondent Clare Morgana Gillis spent several days in the besieged city, the deadliest battleground in Syria's brutal civil war, and what follows are descriptions of the war zone.

The streets in Aleppo's Seif Al-Doula neighborhood are nearly empty, and the air is thick with dust from the rubble produced by three months of constant tank shelling and airstrikes. A foul smell rises from heaps of burning trash that line the paths. Street cats mew as they pick for food scraps, and the few residents who are left gather in bread lines every morning.

The streetlights are out and only the moon brightens the night. Pockets of Free Syrian Army fighters nest in buildings, keeping guard with AK-47s and mixing Molotov cocktails in the dark. The occasional pickup mounted with a machine gun speeds along the deserted streets, but for the most part the fighters ride in sedans.

Hospital overwhelmed

They are outnumbered and definitely outgunned: mortars and tank shells pound the neighborhood throughout the night. But every day they go to the front line to shoot back with their automatic rifles and toss Molotovs, attempting to drive back their opponent.

In the neighborhood of Shaar, Dar Shifa serves as the hospital to one of Aleppo's countless front lines - and this one has been getting closer over the past two weeks. Regime shells have destroyed parts of the now-defunct upper floors.

The emergency care center - maybe thirty square meters, every one of which was bloody in drips, or smears or footprints - would have been the reception desk in another time.

Earlier this month, several suicide bombs claimed as many as 40 lives in Aleppo, including some prominent figures in the Assad regime. No rebel group has claimed responsibility for the blasts, but Islamist militias have been blamed by Syria.

The next day, the regime hit back. Cars raced up to the entrance honking madly, one after another. As many as 50 or 60 injuries came in to the hospital - nearly all of them civilians. At least a dozen were children. Ten or so dead came within several hours.

The injured were mangled by shrapnel - with shattered limbs and jagged cuts. At one point, seven people were being treated on the floor because there simply werer not enough beds or stretchers.

One was a young boy, perhaps 12 years old, naked from the waist down, curled up into a ball, shaking and weeping. He had a sheet pulled up over his legs. The overworked doctors and nurses did not have enough time to comfort him, and his injuries were not severe enough to require immediate attention.

An elderly man gestured frantically, his voice hoarse from screaming. "They hit a school! They hit a school with an airplane!"

He was referring to one of the makeshift shelters in the city where civilians stay, believing themselves to be more secure there than in their homes. But that hope turned out to be false.

"Bashar is a donkey!" he shouted, "a donkey!"

Zakariya, whose face is kind but weary, wears a "Most Valuable Player" T-shirt and tallies the injuries like an accountant. He flips through the blood-stained pages and tries to keep up with the arrivals, storing wallets and identity cards for the families.

He had studied business at the university and has been working at the hospital for the last three months, the bulk of the battle for Aleppo.

In a slower moment, 27-year-old medical student Abdulkareem smiled shyly as his companions teased him in the pharmacy: "He wants to get married, can you help him?" They all burst into laughter.

Abdulkareem spoke fluently in German - he has taken two months of his summer vacation from medical school in Germany to work in Aleppo, despite his family's misgivings: "They don't agree with my decision to come here," he said. "We're fighting about it now."

Outside the hospital, 12-year-old Mohammed giggled as he proudly scrawled his name and his father's name on a piece of paper, and then painstakingly copied the word from a nearby truck in Roman letters: "TOYOTA." But when a car backfired nearby he jumped, his eyes wide as he turned his head frantically looking for the gunfire. Others smoothed his hair and reassured him it was just a car, but it took a few minutes to calm him down.

Then, dodging the street barricades and piles of rubble, he bicycled off alone down the street.

'We are 50 meters from them'

In the narrow, twisting streets of Aleppo's Old City a few shops are open, selling candy, coffee and fruits. Fighters for the Free Syrian Army, largely made up of army defectors, mostly around 20 years old, are standing guard in camouflage vests and sneakers - some wear the black headband "there is no God but God and Mohammed is his prophet."

At one corner, rebel commander Hassan "Abu Sheikh" peered over a map of the area. Red dots are Free Army, he explained, and black dots the army of the regime. The entire map is a speckled patchwork of these dots.

"Right now we are 50 meters from them," he said.

The afternoon's mission: launch two homemade rockets at regime-controlled buildings. Hassan's group is well-organized --there are about 250 men in all and they rotate in and out of Al-Bab, a town east of Aleppo. Fifty of them stay with him in Aleppo, and this mission made use of about twenty.

They all carried flashlights to light dark stairwells as they snaked through spider holes punched through walls linking civilian homes to shops, all long abandoned.

Men crouched low and darted one by one through open alleys where regime snipers were known to be active. One ground-floor shop bore an odd remnant of order in the midst of the dust and chaos: it was a sewing shop, and one room held dusted-over bags of buttons in a rainbow of colors neatly lining the walls from floor to twelve-foot ceiling.

"It's time to fire the rockets," said Hassan.

After a brief prayer, he and his team watched the actual launching on a flat-screen TV that he had rigged as a closed-circuit monitor in a "command center" littered with ashtrays and tea cups. "We do this every day," he said.

Ahmed Aissa, 48, is sole proprietor of a coffee shop on the corner, the only business open in the street next to Hassan's operating base. Ahmed spent 32 years in Lebanon and lived through the civil war there in the 1980s.

"This is so much worse," he said. "At least there, it was the armies fighting: the Lebanese army against Israel, the army against Hezbollah, there were civilian areas that were safe.

"Here, with the warplanes, there is no safe place."

He has nowhere to go, he said, and no other way to make money for his family.

The anti-Assad fighters are not coordinated and, despite increasing weapons aid funneled through Gulf countries that is primarily reaching the more radical Islamist contingent, significantly outgunned.

Their only strength is the fairly large areas under their control. Kalashnikovs, sniper rifles, Molotov cocktails, a few machine guns, the occasional RPG and a few truck-mounted Dushkas against tanks, warplanes, mortars and snipers. It is almost impossible to imagine how Aleppo has not already fallen back into the control of the regime.

For soldiers, defecting is no easy task

Mohammed, 27, a two-year veteran of the regime army who defected two months ago, explained that many of his former fellow soldiers want to defect, but the challenges are great.

"If anyone tries to defect, they will kill him," he said one morning over coffee at a shop in a covered walkway between two buildings. Mohammed planned his own escape carefully, arranging it through a friend who was already part of the Free Syrian Army.

A sweet-faced fighter with close-cropped graying hair and beard gave his name as Abu Khatib as he ate crisp, cool grapes in front of his battalion headquarters in the Old City. He pondered the regime strategy and determined, "they can't kill the revolution, so they kill everyone to make the civilians leave."

Perhaps the regime's army is simply afraid to leave the safety of their tanks; and perhaps the regime fears mass defections if they should order an infantry offensive. Abu Khatib echoes many others when he says the regime has drilled into its soldiers that they are attacking foreign terrorists.

Pounding the civilian population to force the FSA to withdraw is the sole strategy visible on the ground. On any given day at Dar Shifa hospital, 80 or 90 percent of the 70-100 deaths and injuries are to civilians. But the civilians have an advantage, says Abu Khatib.

"We are ready to die for our ideas, but soldiers on the other side are afraid the Free Army will kill them."